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Have a Happy Thought:    Our brains do amazing things with language. And the best part is, we don’t even know our brains are doing half of the things they do. Especially in your first language.   For example, anyone that grew up speaking English will have an immediate reaction to this sentence: Look at this rugby cow oval big leather old brown lovely ball.   You’re probably thinking “what is she even trying to say?!” (yes, that sentiment definitely calls for an Interrobang !)   Try this sentence instead: Look at this lovely big old oval brown cow leather rugby ball. Image: NZ National Army Museum     That one made sense, right?   It’s because of this unspoken, but always followed, rule in English: when you use multiple adjectives, they always go in this order: Number, opinion, size, age, shape, colour, origin, material, purpose, [noun]. ( sometimes you can switch around the first two or three, if you’re using a ...

Have a Happy Thought:    In the 1960s, electrical engineers in the US figured out a way to test whether a new audio communication method was clear enough for people to be able to understand each other. They based their testing methods on something developed during World War II that was used to test military communication lines. The testing method set up in the 1960’s is still in use today. It’s used for lots of things, including: actually testing phone lines (including mobile/cell phones – US-based readers may remember the Verizon “Can you hear me now?” guy…) Watching how actors’ mouths move to make animations (including CGI) more realistic Training text-to-speech (or speech-to-text) algorithms Art   What is this magical test, you ask? It’s random words, put together in groups of 10 “phonetically balanced sentences” – each “sentence” is a group of words that include a mixture of sounds commonly made in English. The idea is that...

Have a Happy Thought:   Birds do it, Bees do it…   No, as much as Ella Fitzgerald would want you to believe that we’re talking about falling in love (although honestly, go listen to that song!), We’re talking about… Play!   Yep, we’ve known for years that some bird species are very playful. Anyone familiar with Kea will have heard so . many . stories . And of course, anyone who’s had a pet bird, or been caught in too much of a YouTube, Instagram , or TikTok loop, has seen a parrot or canary or budgerigar playing around.   But it was only recently that some scientists pretty conclusively found some bees very obviously playing . Basically, the investigators set up a bee-sized obstacle course, between the bees and some food. In part of the obstacle course, there were little wooden balls that the bees could move. On the other side, those wooden balls were glued in place. The bees definitely preferred the option where they could move the balls a...

Have a Happy Thought:    Dinosaurs existed on this planet. Like when you stop to think about that, it should just make you happy. (yes I know birds are dinosaurs and they still exist on this planet) (and yes that should also make you happy!)   But you’re here for more than that, let me tell you a little bit about one specific dinosaur, a Tyrannosaurus rex who lived and died 67 million years ago, but is now a beloved member of the Field Museum in Chicago (and Twitter ) – Sue the T. Rex. Image: the Field Museum of Chicago https://www.fieldmuseum.org/blog/sue-t-rex   Also known as “Specimen FMNH PR 2081”, this dinosaur that may or may not be female (it was named after the discovering palaeontologist, Sue Henderson) is the most complete T. Rex skeleton that’s been found – we have over 90% of the bones.   This means we can learn a lot about T. Rex from Sue (the skeleton, not the palaeontologist). (Ok, probably from both).   Like, could you ...